It’s not all that new of a thing. Metamodern culture is generally thought to have started emerging in the late 90s. Of course there are scattered examples of it even earlier. Now, some people don’t believe there are discernible trends at all in arts and popular culture, in which case, sure this all sounds like BS.
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Hmmm… still sounds like some sugar-coated, white washed fascist bullshit propaganda to my ears.
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I always find golden mean folks to be boring. There’s no right amount of fascism or racism, there’s simply those who want to keep fascism or racism going and those who want it gone so they can live their lives. To debate this as if the anti-fascist/racist side is equally bad as the fascists or racists is just nonsensical to me.
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Now I’m envisioning the creative process:
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I’ve always struggled with take on irony I’ve encountered in like art crit space when I come into contact with it. In the aughts I remember reading something like irony is dead because SpongeBob. But irony was all around me in pop culture and we weren’t even close to saturated yet. There were years to go of increasingly intense and ambiguous irony. Like an ocean of insincerity between then and now.
And at this juncture in time it’s hard for me to say because I really don’t keep up, but I think art works because of ambiguity and that can make it a dangerous metric to use when assessing social sentiments I guess.
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Poking around a bit at the free samples of his books, I can’t detect much substantive analysis beneath the neologisms. It all seems to be on a level only slightly above a self-help seminar or a TedX talk. As philosophy, it’s premium mediocre.
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“Profound nonsense”. This is Deepak Chopra-level mysticism, not philosophy.
Cool. Coolcoolcoolcoolcool cool. I mean, that’s entirely content-free, and has been used for every “paradigm-shifting philosophical revolution” since Plato, but sure.
But what is it? If we’re going to get philosophical on this: these the descriptions in this post are all at least one level away from any content: there is a lot of description of this “philosophy”, but no examples of it. So it tries to mediate between supposed thematic opposites? Is that like Zen koans? Or, like, reconciling opposites in the deeper truth that they are part of the greater whole? Or just, like, bullshit because any two-bit huckster can string together two contronyms and bathe in pseudoprofundity.
Eh. Diogenes did it better, and I will fight you on this. Also, Diogenes had a coherent philosophy he could, and would, engage with you about. He didn’t just go around telling everyone about Cynicism and how awesome it was and promising them that it would change society if they go and buy these two books, and the lecture series, and the tutorials, and the auditing sessions. And that you had to go do those things before you were qualified to speak on whether that sounded a little Cultish.
And he had better reason to do so, because that’s basically how Pythagoreanism worked. Cults were a respectable way of doing theology and philosophy then.
Eh. Robert Anton Wilson did it better, and I will fight you on this.
Eh. Nicolas Bourbaki did it better, and I will fight you on this.
Yes, BUT WHAT IS IT???
That’s… it, is it? Am I right, then, in thinking that the executive summary of this “philosophy” can be summed up as “Utopia is Zen Denmark”?
Cause that doesn’t sound very paradigm-shifting or revolutionary to me. Except in the Douglas Adams sense of “being nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to each other for a change.”
Maybe there’s something in those books to justify what this post takes almost 2000 words trying to make sound impressive.
There would, you would imagine, have to be.
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Yeah, there’s also language about the inherent nature of progress to achieve an ‘ideal’ ‘Western’ state. This stuff sounds like a sophomore using medium-sized words to (barely) mask a (barely coherent) fascist ideology.
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He said, for a nominal service charge
I could reach Nirvana t’nite
If I was ready, willing 'n able
To pay him his regular fee
He would drop all the rest of his pressing affairs
And devote His Attention to me
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A shitload of wank.
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I’ve read this over a couple of times, and there are some serious problems with the post and the works in question.
First, the teleology of the thing… This seems like an attempt to apply the philosophical take on teleology to history… always problematic… In case you need a quick primer on a historians take on teleology, here ya go:
This whole thing comes off as highly teleological in nature - stages of development that seem to happen without people. That at least was where Marx got some shit right. He did not argue that stages of history were inevitable, but rather the result of very complex set of human decisions in situations that are not of their making:
And that it was not just “great men” who made those choices, either, but that those choices were sometimes made from below either in concert or contradiction to “great men”. The modern era was kicked off by people being pushed off the land and into cities demanding greater rights from the people in power. That did not “just happen” but was made to happen. In contrast, this write up simply chalks up change over time to “stages”… perhaps the author goes deeper, but given his own prevalence for believing he has the answers to our troubles, I’m guessing he goes in the opposition direction for explaining change over time (great men, inevitability of “progress”, etc).
Speaking of which…
Second, when ever anyone tells you that they have “THE ANSWER” 
to all of mankind’s ills, take that shit with a huge salt-lick… Shit like this is what I mean:
Now, I want to reveal you your ignorance. I understand that this may be a harsh slap to your pretty little face—not at all a nice thing to do. But Hanzi Freinacht is not nice. He is right. And that is something else entirely.
Um. No. Get the fuck over yourself. Seriously. Even the most clever of us only have our own very narrow, time-bound, imperfect perspective to fully understand the world. We’re ALL going to get a lot of shit wrong, because we are inherently limited in what we can understand about the world around us. This is why humanity has built up institutions and structures to try and store historical and collective understandings of the world around us. No single society got it right. Not the current globalized world we live in and not any society in the past. But if we’re using our hard fought knowledge of the past as a means of ridiculing the societies of the past for “not getting it right” (for example, for people embracing a religious world view rather than a scientific one) then we’re assuming we’re at the top of history, and the point of history. Maybe someone can go talk to Francis Fukuyama about declaring history at an end…
Third…
Hanzi Freinacht is a social scientist, political philosopher, and a larger-than-life Übermensch. He has reached for higher truths while living a hermit lifestyle in the Swiss Alps and, as a contemporary Zarathustra, he has come down from the mountains to share his visions for a better future for humankind.
Given the very real 20th century application of these terms by genocidal regimes… maybe rethink your use of this term. There are no people who are more “uber” than others and anyone who believes that is thinking down a very wrong and dangerous path that only has one conclusion. Just stop, will ya. Seriously, how many white male philosophy students have gone into the field just to “prove” their own intellectual superiority" by using big words… just stop that. If you’re smart, humble yourself a bit, and maybe see what you can do to better the lives of the rest of humanity, even if it’s in a small way. So if @Metamodern_Curious and others are wondering why we’re all seeing nazis under the philosophical bed here - the arrogance of “I’m right and will fix everything with my brilliant ideas from the centrist position” and the use of terms like ubermensch are a big part of that. The nazis also positioned themselves as third way between capitalism and communism, thought they were all nietzschian supermen, and believe that they were the solution to humanities ills. That did not work out well.
Last, this focus on Europe as holding the solution to our ills is another red flag. Like… pick up a history book (that isn’t weighed down by pointless philosophizing) and see what problems the rise of modernity caused. The postmodernists were absolutely correct in their criticism of the enlightenment… but they did not throw it all out the window. They just understood the very real destruction imperialism backed by a philosophical system that assumed its own farts smelled like roses no matter what did to the majority of humanity. I’m not saying that all of European philosophy is “wrong”… indeed there is some great stuff in there. But the same applies to the philosophical worldviews of other places around the world. Every value system is a mess of contradiction of good and bad, practical and impractical, grounded and pie-in-the-sky… and sometimes, the pie-in-the-sky shit is just as good as the practical. We need to look at the modern world system in a clear-eyed manner - to acknowledge the good and the bad, and look to other things outside of capitalism (which has become just a secular religion, honestly) to augment what we have now. I don’t think tearing down the system completely rather than seeking to transform it will work out in a positive manner.
And let’s remember the wise words of Ursula K LeGuin, one of the greatest real philosophers of our time:
So, that’s my $.02 on this post.
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Hanzi Freinacht is a social scientist, political philosopher, and a larger-than-life Übermensch. He has reached for higher truths while living a hermit lifestyle in the Swiss Alps and, as a contemporary Zarathustra, he has come down from the mountains to share his visions for a better future for humankind.
More about this Nordic ubermensch…
Hanzi Freinacht is an independent seeker of truth untainted by outmoded academic models who holds multiple doctorates and double-doctorates from the finest universities on the European continent. He lives a life of monastic poverty in a Swiss chalet that’s been in his family for generations, a former retreat from their activities in the steel, chemical and nitrate extration industries now turned into a temple of solitary intellectual exploration. Such is this hermit’s commitment to solitude and self-reliance that he makes sure to take hikes on the multi-hectare property when the housekeeper, handyman, landscaper, grocery delivery boy, and other retainers arrive on their appointed schedules.
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Hanzi Freinacht is explicitely a fictional character. In the books he explains the reasons of this narrative device, and he intentionally plays this larger-than-life persona. His books represent a very precise marriage of content and form in the emerging metamodern canon. It’s like the mad scientist Rick Sanchez (from Rick & Morty) was teaching philosophy.
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Ah, yet another member of the “listening society” who can’t be bothered to read what others have said. I see I’ll have to quote myself from above, with bolding to help the geniuses get the point.
Your question answered clearly, am I not allowed to riff on the detailed history of a fictional character, one who’s already (supposedly) a parody?
That’s very evident, just not in the flattering way you seem to think it is.
Justin Roiland makes it clear that Rick, though a brilliant man, is not someone anyone with good sense or basic human compassion should listen to. Edgelord white fanbois, as is their wont*, completely miss that point. I can’t blame “Hanzi’s” fans for missing a similar point because his creators clearly intend him to be a larger-than-life vehicle for their own views.
[* see also Gordon Gecko, Tony Montana, Tony Soprano, Don Draper, etc.]
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And this is supposed to be a good thing?
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Tyler Durdin, Walter White,
Tyler Durdin, Walter White, Patrick Bateman…
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Gonna have to come back to unpack the rest of the responses here… 
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I will say there is one thing I do like about this article – its title. “The Metamodernism OF Hanzi Freinacht” at least makes clear that this is not about metamodernism writ large. Of those of us who’ve been using metamodernism to examine currents of contemporary culture for quite a while now (like BojackCatMan), most don’t pay attention to this Hanzi stuff at all; others know about it but take pains to distance ourselves from, e.g. the stage theory stuff.
I write this mainly to clarify that when you see “the metamodernism community” or “metamodernists” these are likely the folks trying to make a political movement out of it. Not so for the rest of us. We wish to god they’d just come up with their own damn name. It’s a huge pain how much misunderstanding this has led to.
Not that anyone asked for a genealogy, but, just FYI in academic communities, “metamodernism” was coined about 5 different times – first in 1975 (Zavarzadeh–in literature), later in 1992 (Haig-Communications studies), then in the early 2000s (Okediji-Art history; Dumitrescu-literature) – before it gathered sufficient momentum to coalesce around some observations and ideas that are actually really super interesting (and not at all reminiscent of Hanziism) in around 2010. And THEN these other folks came along.
TL;DR: if you come across the term “metamodernism” please don’t automatically conclude that it’s being employed in the Hanziistic way of this article.
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Two more days of this delightful topic and all its’ cogent, easily explained principles which actually have a practical application in the physical world we inhabit.
Oh, joy…
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